Kingdoms Come and Go

Elliot Carlyle sat in his study, alone as always. His solemn face pressed against the window. He put his head on his desk and sighed. As he looked back outside, a crimson object caught his gaze. He leapt up, thrusting his head into the low ceiling.

“Aagh!”

“Someone’s here! Someone’s here!” Elliot giggled downstairs. Outside, he strolled over to the mutilated man in the street. Organs, blood, and assorted viscera flowed back inside the man from a chunky puddle. He began writhing and woke screaming.

A few days later, Derek stood at the study window staring at the drab scenery, wearing a sunken look. Elliot slipped into the room, sneaking up behind him. Elliot heaved him out the window and Derek sailed screaming into the ground.

“What the hell, man?” Derek yelled up. “You could’ve killed me!”

“No, I couldn’t!” Elliot called down, laughing raucously. “I wish I still had a camera for the look on your face.

“Oh, I forgot the invincibility!”

Elliot jumped out the window to Derek.

“It’s going to take a while to get used to this,” Derek said. Elliot turned grim.

“I’m afraid, my friend, that you don’t have a while.”

“What?”

“You forget your youth. Make the most of it.” Elliot began walking inside.

“What happened?” asked Derek. “Why are you here?”

Elliot sighed. “Come in,” he croaked.

They sat at a table downstairs.

“I was there,” Elliot began, “when the EternaLife treatment trials began. They went perfectly. I even signed up for it on a waiting list, but I died too soon.”

“Wasn’t that 60 years ago?”

“Yes, 62 years. I’ve been here 58. There were others like me, centuries-old fogeys wanting to remove the qualifier from their nearly-endless lives. I imagine they remain here, somewhere, going mad in the wasteland resulting from their, and my, desire for immortality. There were those like you here, too, young people whose lives were cut short in both worlds by violence in the first.”

Six years and many normally dangerous stunts later, Elliot and Derek strolled through the empty town on one of their walks, fondly called “Crosswalks” by Elliot.

“…however, my friend, you must never set yourself afire. You might not die, but it hurts like hell!” concluded Elliot.

“You said that already,” replied Derek. The youth in his voice halted Elliot.

“Yes… yes,” he mumbled. He eyed Derek. Derek’s chiseled face had shrunken and softened into that of a child. Elliot darkened. Derek noticed.

“What is it?”

“Nothing.” They kept walking.

That night, Elliot lay awake. He had noticed his own youth in the bathroom mirror while preparing for bed. His mind was occupied, not by his soon-returning prime, but by his friend gradually wasting away. Mentally searching for courses of action, he recalled tales of the dead lingering at, haunting, their places of death on Earth. Unable to bear Derek’s further deterioration, he thought of his old enemy, Pierre Renard. They’d disliked each other in life, and, after lucklessly encountering each other, hated each other in Kingdom Come. However, Renard had been obsessed with returning to life after also missing EternaLife. Elliot knew Renard was Derek’s best hope.

Later, while Derek slept, Elliot snuck out in search of Renard. Slogging through the hills in the icy darkness, he spotted a chimney ahead. Over another hill, he found the rest of the house.

“I’ve found him. Jerk.”

Going inside, Elliot found the house disheveled. Looking around, he found barely legible scribbles on the walls and books strewn across the floors, but no Renard. Elliot remembered that Renard had been near his current age when he had first arrived in Kingdom Come.

“It’s been a while,” Elliot said softly. “He’s gone.” He felt a strange sadness at his enemy’s grotesque demise.

Upstairs, Elliot found a journal on Renard’s desk in a circle cleared of debris. Inspecting it, he found scribbles like those on the walls, but the journal’s were in a child’s handwriting. He read:

“Pierre Renard

Age 7.5

Despite locating the ingress between worlds, I fear consumption by youth’s infirmity is near. My only hope is reaching the impasse state immediately. My journey begins tomorrow. Godspeed.”

He flipped back a few pages, finding a shakily drawn map to the so-called ingress and a similarly drawn diagram titled “Impasse State,” depicting two opposing lines labeled “age” with a circle labeled “Infinite life” in the center. Elliot had found all he needed. Morning neared, so he returned home with the journal.

After another day witnessing Derek’s degeneration, Elliot again snuck out to check the map’s accuracy. The ingress seemed far, but Elliot thought the journey possible. A frigid journey later, Elliot arrived at the map’s specified location, a land depression between hills. He saw nothing extraordinary. Stepping forward, however, Earth appeared to him. Squinting, he noticed he was looking at the dreary retirement home where his final stroke occurred.

“Kingdom Go.”

At his house, the sky simmered as Elliot launched upstairs and promptly woke Derek.

“Whaaat?” Derek slurred.

“Derek! I’ve found it! I can let you live!”

“Wha-? I am living.”

“Please just come with me.” Thus, the two walked to the ingress.

On arrival, Elliot explained.

“Since you’re dead, you age backwards. Everything on Earth ages forwards. If you go through that gateway to Earth, the ingress, you get stuck between forward and backward and live forever, agelessly, invincibly on Earth.” Elliot prodded, “Go there, in the middle.”

“I did it! He’s safe!” Looking through the ingress, he fell to dejection. A ghostly young Derek floated across the decrepit basement in a shadow of his older self. His skin formed gashes. A torso-length incision caused his organs to spill onto the floor.

“What’s happening? Why isn’t he ageless?” Elliot muttered, flipping through Renard’s journal, finding nothing to explain the scene. He stepped forward and looked around. The location of death of each visitor to the ingress was visible, and behind Derek’s and his was a child of around seven in the shadow of an old Frenchman having a heart attack. Elliot shook further as the scene reset and ran again.

“Oh, God. It’s not a complete standstill. What have I done?”

Elliot sobbed back to the house and through the night. He’d doomed his only friend to repeat his death forever. Eventually, Elliot’s sobs turned to chuckles, which led into deranged laughter. After nearly 250 years, his mind was finally gone.

“Nobody comes here without dying,” he giggled, “and nobody does that anymore.” The image of Derek in the ingress swirled in his mind. He growled, “Perhaps I’ll give them a little vacation, all expenses paid to Kingdom Come.”

I was confused on the business of nobody being there and nobody dying, however.
Elliot says “You come here when you die…” but when Derek then asks why no one else is there Elliot tells him no one ever dies anymore. Derek died to get there so it would seem that there could be others who had died around the same time so why couldn’t others be there?

I liked how Derek and Elliot enjoyed trying out all of the ways to test their invincibility – very playful and childlike which tied well to their aging backward

I could see this as a novel. You have a great imagination. Keep writing!

Everyone on Earth at the beginning of the story has received EternaLife, so they cannot die of natural causes. However, EternaLife does not protect from homicide. Not to spoil too much from my future long version, but society on Earth is peaceful enough that very few people are killed by others, thus making it very unlikely for Elliot to encounter them as they are scattered across Kingdom Come when they die. As far as Elliot knows, no one has died in a decades since he hasn’t encountered anyone.

I’m glad others think this would work as a novel, since I started on the novel version right after I submitted this!

Hi Adam, interesting story and I love the themes you explore, especially the idea of the ‘in-between’ ghost realm, which was horrifying! Like Rosemary above, I also found myself wondering why Derek hadn’t received Eternalife treatment. I think the Kingdom Come and Kingdom Go titles are clever, but ‘Kingdom Come’ is so strongly linked to Christianity that I wondered whether there was some kind of deity involved?
Those are just minor points and I agree with the others that this would make a great novel. 1,500 words is not many words with which to play with such original concepts!
Thanks for sharing your story and good luck in the contest!
Georgina

Thank you very much, Georgina! EternaLife does not protect against violence, only natural aging. Thus, anyone killed by violence will still died enter the afterlife. Derek has received EternaLife, but he is brutally murdered.

“Kingdom Come” in reference to the “afterlife” presented in this story is simply a nickname used by Elliot. The reality of the in-world afterlife is that it is effectively an alternate universe. It might, however, be interesting if Elliot thinks that he is being tormented by a deity due to all of his misfortune.

I’m glad that readers think that this would be a good novel starting point, because I’ve already started working on just that!